Mandarin in Éguó

I didn’t think about it too much, I just chose it. Decisions are much easier to make on impulse...

Kuban State University: entrance.


MANDARIN IN KRASNODAR

It’s now been 2 weeks since I started studying Mandarin at Kuban State University and a few things have become clear to me:

1)    I’m learning Mandarin for the same reason I read Harry Potter.

For years, practically-minded people who live dull-lives in boring old administrative jobs – who work for money rather than passion and who spend their days in front of computers, straining their little red eyes, before coming home and crying softly into their unsatisfied pillows – have been telling be that languages degrees are pointless. Despite the fact that these people are often uncreative, dull and so stressed that they can no longer achieve an erection, I listened to them and tried to explain logically that I wanted to excel at what I loved. Even if I end up dirt poor (which I doubt), I will be happy: surrounded by information that inspires me, entertains me and makes me appreciate my one attempt at human life. (Although maybe if I learn too much Chinese, I might start believing I’ll be reincarnated.)  

Anyway, the same people that love to tell me that languages are pointless, because you’ll never make money as a translator (failing to see, that I don’t want to be a translator.), like to say that the only worthwhile language to learn is Mandarin, because this is going to be the new lingua franca. (I doubt that Mandarin is going to be the next lingua franca for a variety of reasons, but that´s another topic.)

My automatic reaction was to therefore refuse to learn Mandarin. I became biased against the language. I wanted to learn for pleasure, not because someone told me too.  But, eventually, there always comes a point when interest triumphs over prejudice. There are only so many lovely Chinese motherly women you can meet along your travels, before you want to curl up in their arms and fall asleep under a rocking Chinese lullaby, dreaming of the winds passing through the bamboo and stroking the panda cub’s cheeks… So I decided to learn it for the people I have met and in the belief that every language is fascinating, every language is rich in new insights and every language broadens the way you perceive the world… I have no doubt this will be true.

This situation is in some ways analogous to my experience with Harry Potter. For years, everyone around me was reading it and telling me to read it. At the time, I didn´t like fantasy books or conforming to the masses (I was even an individualist in my tender childhood years). So I decided I would read for pleasure what I thought would be good and not what everyone else was recommending. 

Eventually, when I was already well into my teens, I decided I would just give in, find out what everyone was talking about and read all the books in one go… and, well, I liked it! It wasn’t, per se, a series of books that left me obsessed (like many fans) – I can barely even remember what happened. But it was a productive way to spend my time and a fun experience. So now I live in the hope that even if I forget all my Chinese (like the plot of Harry Potter), I will still have hours of pleasure, buzzing off the pleasure of learning languages. And if it does become the lingua franca, I guess that will make me one of those hipster kids: ‘Guys, come on… I totally started learning Mandarin first, you wittle-bittle copy cats! I had the Chinese symbol for swan tattooed on the underside of my toenails in 1996, and I was fluent in all the dialects surrounding the Mongolian frontier by 1998!”

2)  The teacher doesn’t actually speak fluent Chinese even though she studied at Moscow State

 (which is considered to be one of the best universities in Russia).

 I’m not really sure why this is: maybe the language is just so hard that she didn’t manage; maybe she’s never been to China; maybe she spent all her time learning symbols and reading ancient poetry in the original rather than learning conversational speech; or maybe she paid for her grades at university: apparently it’s possible to get into the best universities in Russia based on money rather than necessarily merit (not to say that there aren’t extremely intelligent people there). A lot of people have asked me whether I got into Cambridge by paying money, to which I reply that you need to be quite intelligent/knowledgeable to get in… or, you need to have been given all the opportunities in life to become knowledgeable or intelligent. I.e. you definitely have a better chance of getting in if you’ve been brought up in an environment that has enough financial resources to encourage your learning (a French tutor, a good school, access to textbooks…), but you’re not going to be able to bribe your way in with a dirty cheque or a posh accent: when it comes to the interviews, everybody should theoretically be judged on the same level.

The Russians seemed pretty impressed. To be honest, maybe the teacher has just forgotten a lot of her Mandarin: she has to look up a lot of the tones for words before she gives them to us as vocab. But in the words of my Chinese friend: ‘I know someone who knows her…and yeah, she can’t hold a normal conversation.’

This is a little depressing as it makes me feel that I might end up on a similar level even after decades of learning. But I hold fast to the belief that practice will make … maybe not perfect, but pretty darn good, Sally. So if I decide to pursue this interest for a good few years and then piss off to China for a while, I’ll probably end up a lot better than the teacher.  And if not, then it will still have been a useful experience, I hope.  I will at least be able to teach my grandchildren to eat with chopsticks and maybe add in some of the useful phrases I’ve learnt so far, such as: ‘It is a very large potato’, ‘Mother and little sister are buying vegetables’ and ‘I love to sing Russian folk songs’.

3)    Mandarin is therapeutic.

As stated before, the fact that the teacher can’t hold a normal conversation is, to say the least, discouraging to those of us who have some sort of vague dream of becoming fluent and really impressing our future Chinese mother-in-laws, but it is more than compensated by the beauty of learning – if only for learning’s sake. If I can someone put the deadlines to the back of my mind (and all the associated stress), learning Mandarin is a real pleasure. It is so beautiful and relaxing to sit with my oversized mug of tea under a dim lamp – or maybe the light of the sunset – and just draw pretty patterns of symbols over and over and over again, each time getting a little bit better, or, at least, caring less about how they look. Sometimes I completely zone out, clear my mind for a while, go off wandering… and then realize I’ve drawn a symbol about 100 times, but have no memory of what order the strokes are in or how it is pronounced because I’ve just been dreaming. 

Then I think ‘well, at least I can try to retrace the dream. Maybe it will be good for my writing. An inspiration’. But the dream is gone and faded, and all I have are lots of identical, ruled pages and the fond feeling of ‘maybe I managed to forget worries for a while, maybe I was in a peace for a while. Maybe there was no time for a while. Just the peace passed….’  After that kind of experience, I either feel really relaxed and want to sleep, or I remember I have to learn 20 symbols by tomorrow, get stressed and tell myself off for being such an incorrigible hippy.

4)    My symbols are poor, crippled little critters.

My REALLY battered textbook. 

 I’ve never had a visual memory: I’ve excelled at languages because I’ve worked hard and because I’ve been good at remembering words, at phrasing my thoughts in appropriate or interesting ways and at managing to pronounce the words pretty much correctly. And also because whatever talents I had were always backed up by an interest in culture and an obsession grammar that made me eat up reference books and Wikipedia lots of unnecessary pieces of information in the foreign language.

When it comes to Mandarin, the grammar is very easy (so that interest has been reduced), and the symbols are very complex. I have trouble drawing them correctly because my hand is not designed for artistic purposes i.e. I have bad hand-eye coordination. I can barely even draw a straight line. When I did art at school, I felt so terrible at it compared to the other students that it gave me panic attacks and I used to hide in the toilets instead. I was near top of the class at everything else – so why was I always the worst an art? It made me nervous. I used to try to draw a painting for hours and then, frustrated, give up, and looking at the soggy mess (I always used too much water), burst out in tears and dry the flimsy, wet paper on the radiator.

Now 7 years on, I’ve got better at accepting that my symbols look like little broken mutations of the other students’ virtuoso efforts. But I will love them anyway: broken, incorrect and fragile as they are. Maybe they’ll get better over time. Maybe this will be the key to fixing my hand-eye coordination and reducing my danger to society: bumping into people; failing to walk in straight lines; hitting innocent children on my bike… (although in my defence, that child DID jump out of a bush.) . In any case, I can always type on the computer using pinyin instead of writing by hand (advantages of the 21^st century).

5)    Mandarin may be helping me to speak better Russian (and vice versa)…. 

My textbook... which has the annoying habit of only showing traditional characters even though we've been instructed to learn simplified characters (i.e. I spend a lot of time googling and double checking characters)

Most people acknowledge that the more languages you’ve mastered or learnt, then easier it will be for you to learn a new one. There will be lots of grammar structures and sounds that you will be able to copy and paste from other languages, plus you will be constantly training the areas of your brain which are responsible for foreign language acquisition.

Well, this is in theory true. But Mandarin and Russian are extremely different. The sound systems and the grammar have very little in common. Mandarin grammar is fairly easy for an English speaker, Russian grammar is extremely, extremely difficult for an English speaker. Mandarin is pretty difficult to pronounce for an English speaker, Russian is also really quite difficult to pronounce for an English speaker (but not in the same ways i.e. tones vs. consonant clusters + soft/hard sounds). I have been helped by English sounds in pronouncing some Mandarin consonants, but not so much by Russian sounds. My Chinese tutor, Ai Jing, seems to think English is a much better starting language for learning Chinese than Russian.

Moreover, I’m starting to wonder whether ‘Far Eastern Studies’ was the best choice for my Russian language skills. Of course, studying with Russians and in Russian means that I have extra conversational practice in Russian and I find the lectures interesting. But the problem is that I’ve turned into a perpetual schemer. My grades here don’t affect my grades in Cambridge. As a result, if I have to get up at 6.30 for a lecture… I just… don’t. And given that my teacher for the  Mandarin classes isn’t the best (she just tells us what to learn, not how to learn), I often feel it’s better just to learn the material at home. She follows the text book to the word, so I will always know what will be happening in the next lesson. Moreover, she draws the symbols too quickly for me to copy down correctly, so I always end up googling the correct stroke order when I get home anyway. 

The alternative would have been to study at a Russian language course for foreigners – but I was worried that the level would be too low and that I would end up only having foreign friends. Maybe I would have been better to study something like literature or linguistics – or maybe I would then the level would have been too high and I would have sunk down into a swamp of new vocabulary so deep that it would have just been impossible at the beginning to stop myself from getting discouraged. It’s hard to know what the right thing would have been to do, but now I’m combining Russian with Mandarin, going to lectures in Russian and speaking only Russian with my friends. I hope this will be enough Russian for now. I’m trying to top it up by reading Harry Potter in Russian, but I often don’t have time. I would have read something else (I’m not a huge Harry Potter fan, as you’ve already read), but I find it much less discouraging to read books where I understand 70%-90% of the words straight away. That way I can learn a few new words a day without impeding my understanding of the text. If I try to read Tolstoi right now, I will only end up wanting to jump off a bridge into a pernicious river of old Slavonic terms.

6)    Mandarin has introduced me to new people.

A picture of me hanging out with my Chinese teacher and an Armenian friend. We drank tea and had a typical russian ФОТОСЕССИЯ (fotosessija) 

A lot of Chinese people I’ve met are just so… lovely. Gentle, patient, understanding. I’ve managed to do a deal with a woman called, Ài Jìng. Once a week I meet up with her for free: she teaches me Chinese and I teach her English. Her tiny little bedroom (which she shares with 2 other Chinese students) is very cute, her tea is tasty and she’s really helpful.

She is also very entertaining. Especially when she tells me that I am accidentally pronouncing words wrong and saying crazy phrases. For example, I recently became an unexpected patriot when I told her that I loved my country, rather than my dog. (I don’t even have a dog, but I was just really proud that I knew how to say that sentence.) I also asked her what Chinese people thought about cats, rather than Chairman Mao. It did seem a bit strange when she said Chairman Mao was gentle and nice to stroke…

I’m starting to wonder whether I should just drop the ineffective classes at uni, increase my visits to Ài Jìng’s comfortable little den and learn Russian from my friends and from reading. Maybe I could get a Russian tutor for pronunciation, grammar and correction of texts.

In any case, I’m pretty dissatisfied that I’ve paid £800 for the first semester (even if this will be largely refunded by my university) and I don’t want to go to the classes. But then again, as an exchange student, who hasn’t graduated yet, there’s pretty much no way to get an easy, long-term Russian visa without studying at a university….

I don’t know whether I will be able to pursue Mandarin professionally after my university course in Russia, but maybe it will become a personal hobby: a good way to fill my evenings for, say, 10 years and an excuse to visit a beautiful country with fascinating people.

In any case, I am trying my best, and we will see how things progress....

Wish me luck. I’m starting to like this strange language!

Take care, my beauties!  

Interview with Russian LGBT rights activist, Vladislav Slavskii (reblog)

This is a reblog from my LGBT+ issues page: qrusblog.com 

An example of an international protest against holding the Olympics in Russia, after the introduction of homophobic legislation. Vladislav does not support a boycott. 

Recently I met with teenage LGBT rights activist, Vladislav Slavskii, from Sochi, who has been campaigning both online and in public against homophobic violence in Russia, including several protests against the violent murder of Vladislav Tornovoi in the spring of this year. Vladislav arrived at my home at 3 am on a Saturday night, slightly confused and dishevelled, straight off the 6 hour train. He hadn't been able to arrive any earlier: he's an extremely busy man.  Just that day he'd had an interview with the Washington Post (sounds pretty glamorous); the next day he had to work for less than £3 an hour in order to survive (sounds distinctly less glamorous).

 He wanted to talk to me as a Westerner, believing that I could help in publicizing his message. I agreed to record our conversation and write it up -- in the hope that this small gesture could have some contribution towards informing the public about the situation in Russia. Unfortunately, due to a transport problem, Vladislav and I only had a few hours to talk, where we expected a whole day to meticiulously discuss the topic.  Nonetheless, we decided to proceed with a short interview. We rushed to a cafe, frantically began to eat salad which was served to us by an uncharacteristically smily Russian woman, and I recorded our quick conversation on my iPod.  It went as follows:

  Vladislav, you are openly gay in school. How does this affect your life? 

I am regularly attacked by homophobes when it is dark, i.e. in the evenings. I am constantly insulted and bullied in school. The principal condemns the actions of the homophobic students, but there is practically nothing he can do. The school  counsellor at first reacted very unfriendly towards me. She called my mother into school and asked, indignant,  ‘How am I going to explain to my 12 year old daughter, what gay means? She asked me what it meant.’

 However, later, after my attempts to get the attention of law enforcement and various activists, and after the coverage of the events in online media, the school principal started to summon the homophobes to his office and tell them off for their actions. From 11 February 2013, I studied at home, in order to avoid bullying. Now than I’m in the 11^th class, I have to go back to school because I need intensive preparation for my exams. They won’t give me permission to study at home. Now I am bullied again on a daily basis.

 Moreover, I am constantly phoned up at random hours of the day and night by teenagers who mock me and ask for detailed descriptions of how gays have sex. It can get very tiring having to explain biology to those poor curious souls.

  Vladislav, why and how did you first become involved in activism?

 Well, my first activism was online. Almost immediately after I hit puberty and realized I was attracted to men, I stumbled upon quite useful information online and pretty quickly understood that I was normal: that society was sick, not me. Now that I have a boyfriend -- we've been together over a year -- I'm even more certain that this isn't an illness: I can't find something as beautiful and sincere as this love anywhere else. Nonetheless, not everyone is like this. My boyfriend finds it very hard to deal with his sexuality. I've been trying to help him for over a year, and he still can't accept and love himself. So that's really how my activism started: I communicated with people like him online, and tried to convince them that they weren't sick or worthless like society told them, but that it's normal to have an alternative sexuality. It's just the way you're born, and as long as you're not harming others, you have the right to love and enjoy life.

  So your first activism was online. But after a certain point, you decided to carry out  protests in public. Is this correct?

Yes, my first demonstration took place in the Spring of 2013. I travelled to Armavir and there I met together with a local activist, some students and a local politician (who, for the purposes of this blog and in the interests of his/her safety, has to remain anonymous). This was after the brutal murder of Vladislav Tornovoi on the night of 9th May. His friends raped him with 3 glass bottles, before beating him to death with a 20kg rock, because he was believed to be gay. We carried out a protest of solidarity. There were protests like this across the whole of Russia.

  Why did you chose to protest in this city and not in Sochi?

Firstly, it was less dangerous. There was no-one I thought would attack me. Of course, after our protest they kicked-up a horrible fuss in that city... but luckily, I had already left. Secondly, there is an activist who lives there and helped me with everything. I even have a photo where I am standing with a rainbow flag beside a statue of Lenin.

  And your other protests?

 My second protest took place in Sochi, on the 'Day for the Protection of Children'. It was against homophobia in the education system.  After yet another teenager was subjected to unacceptable violence... We wanted to let other countries know about the nightmare that is happening in Russia. Of course, all our signs were written in English. We took photos with these signs. Luckily enough, no one understood the texts. Because of that, we didn't get arrested. A police man came up to us, but we told him that we were just taking photographs. After that, we unfolded a small rainbow flag and took photos with it. We didn't dare unfold the large rainbow flag, because the police man was standing nearby.

  So the policeman left you alone during your protest?

 Not exactly. He was already there when we started, and he approached us, taking interest in our protest. So we told him it was simply a photography project. He didn't understand a word of English.  On the signs we wrote things like 'HELP! RUSSIA IS KILLING US!". If he had have understood, we would have been arrested.

  Why was everything written in English?

 Our protest was aimed at foreign countries, so that they could see the nightmare that is happening in Russia. On our signs we wrote about how homophobic violence is everywhere in Russia, that LGBT teenagers can't study normally in schools without facing abuse, and about the fact that Russia is the country in Europe with the highest rate of teen suicide. We asked for help. Then I contacted a leading human rights organization and they started to share information abut our protest on foreign internet resources. Especially on American social networks, groups. The message even reached Barack Obama. The leader of the organization met with him and explained the situation.

  Do you think that the activism is working?

Well, I think it's worth a try. The Western World has started to take notice... and we want them to know that they're doing the right thing by supporting us. At the moment I can't carry out any more protests in Sochi, because I am constantly attacked after protests. (...) If someone organizes a protest in Sochi, then I'll take part. But I won't organize any more protests in Sochi myself. It's dangerous. They will throw stones at me.

  Protests have been banned during the Sochi olympics -- perhaps out of fear of LGBT+ protests. Some are suggesting that as a result, we should boycott the Winter Olympics. Do you agree? 

No, I think it is better to continue with the Olympics under the slogan of defending human rights. In my opinion, this will be much more effective. We will protest even if it is forbidden, and the West can film the results. Or, like some activists have suggested, we could move the Olympics to another country, so that Russia understands the consequences of restricting the civil rights of LGBT people.

  Has the new homophobic legislation in Russia increased or decreased the popularity of Vladimir Putin and the United Russia party?

  These laws have increased Putin's popularity. Some people who I have talked to used to hate him, but now they support him. This was one of the goals of the laws. Instead of trying to encourage a tolerant society, the president is resorting to most basic negative human instinct of hating those who are different in order to keep his office.

  Is the younger generation more tolerant towards LGBT+ issues than their parents?

Unfortunately, they’re less tolerant. Amongst young people, sexism and homophobia are getting stronger. There are lots of prejudices against LGBT people. Young people these days love to humiliate and bully others: it doesn’t matter what the precise reason is. The important thing is that the victim is considered to be different.

  Do you think that LGBT activists in Russia rely too much on help from the West? A lot of Russians seem to think the LGBT movement is someting that has been imported from the West, and is funded by Westerners...

For as long as anyone can remember, the state has considered us to be U.S. agents... They even thought this way before anyone asked for any help from the West. They constantly accuse us of wanting to destroy Russia's moral values. They think that we are receiving money from the West, but that's simply not the case. Unfortunately, we barely even have pennies to our names, because LGBT organizations in Russia are practically illegal.

  Do you fear your future?

 Of course, I fear the future. I fear that things will get much worse. They will probably start arresting homosexuals for the simple fact that they are gay.

  How long will it take for the situation to get that bad?

Unfortunately, I don't know. Sources close to the ruling party 'United Russia' spoke anonymously to LGBT activists a few times and said that they aim to recriminalize homosexuality.

Is the Kremlin exerting pressure on individual LGBT activists?

 Yes. Consider Nikolai Alekseev. He's practically lost his mind, the poor guy. He's writing really crazy things. On his twitter he's insulting Barack Obama and making comments against Jews. Moreover, he supports Vladimir Putin. I don't understand how anyone can support both LGBT rights and Vladimir Putin.

  Perhaps he thinks that he must side with the ruling party in order to make his movement popular?

 Probably, yes. At the moment he is trying to meet with Vladimir Putin in order to discuss the situation which is happening in Russia at the moment. Maybe this could help... But I would prefer independent activists to meet with Putin, activists who haven't been pressurized into acting in a certain way by the Kremlin. The Kremlin is manipulating him -- the close source told me so.  The state threathened him, they carried out a raid in his home. After that, he changed his tactics. A raid on your home is a sign that you are going to be arrested unless you change your behaviour. It's a threat from the state.

They raid your apartment, throw everything around the place.... and, of course, don't clean up after themselves. If the individual doesn't start behaving in the way the state wants, then they come around a second time...and... it will lead to arrest.

  Will your activism have a result on your chances of getting into university?

Luckily, it probably won't. Our exams are independently regulated i.e. anonymous. You don't write your surname, just a code.

  But you want to continue to study in Russia, correct?

I don't want to study in Russia, but I don't have the financial resources to leave. Not yet, anyway.

   If you do manage to leave Russia in the future, will you continue to support the LGBT+ movement from abroad?
I think I will probably work in an LGBT organization, and also in the education sector. I want to study to become a linguist. I want to learn English. That is probably the only way I will be able to leave Russia.

  A lot of educated Russians, especially political activists, decide to leave Russia. Or they  claim they are forced out. LGBT rights activist, Masha Gessen, for example. Do you think if fewer educated people left Russia, conditions would be better?

 If these people were to work together, then of course, we would be able to stop what is happening in Russia right now. But you have to think about the individual. That person didn't need those problems. They just wanted to live happily - a normal life. That's also what I want for myself... I don't want to sit around here, waiting for life to get better. Especially given the fact that I don't know whether it's actually going to get better. Every day I lose a little bit of hope -- with every new homophobic comment by politicians, after every new restrictive law.

  Some people say that this stage of new anti-homophobic legislation and behaviour is just a backlash that will wash over quickly and give way to quick progress. For example, in the United Kingdom under Thatcher legislation was introduced banning the 'promotion of homosexuality', which sounds at least at first glance similar to the legislation against 'non-traditional' sexual behaviours. And yet by 2004 Civil partnerships were approved.  Do you think there could be a similar quick rate of progress towards LGBT+ friendly legislation in Russia?

 No, absolutely not.  Russia is a very different case. Russia has always been different due to the fact that people are willing to bear anything. They will put up with anything the state wants. The protest movement in Russia is tiny.  There are lots of people online who will write things like 'We hate this! We don't want this kind of state!', but there is practically no protest movement on the street. There aren't enough people protesting on the streets to resist the state. As a result, these people can easily be arrested: put one or two in jail, and scare off the rest. Simple.

  The majority of homosexuals in Russia don't think they need this kind of movement. 'Why? I can just go on hiding my sexuality. That way I can survive'.  But I can't bear this. I can't love and live in secret. How can they live like this? How can they hide who they are? Sometimes they don't even understand why we need an LGBT movement for human rights. They think that we are just making things worse. Of course, there are some activists who actually ARE making things worse. When they started a protest beside a children's library, it had a very negative effect on the way LGBT people were perceived...

 [ED: Paedophilia and Homosexuality are often conflated in Russia. People believe both to be 'perversions', which are interlinked. I.e. a homosexual could well turn into a paedophile, and vice versa.]

  Is it the case that there are fewer women and transgenered people involved in the movement than males?

 Yes, there are very few transgender activists. But there are quite a lot of women involved in Russia. Masha Gessen, Kostjuchenko, other activists. For example, Masha Kozlovksaya from the LGBT network. In fact, the women are braver. In our demonstration in Sochi, it was mainly girls who participated. And not only in Sochi. ...

 I want to ask Vladislav many more questions, but time runs out and I am left feeling interested, but also quite deflated. I feel sad for the people he protests for, who have been attacked or murdered. But mostly for the countless teenagers who learn to hate themselves or  even commit suicide, because they do not love in the 'traditional' Russian manner. Vladislav claims the most homophobic politicians are gay or alternatively orientated: unable to accept themselves in such a intolerant society, they direct their frustration to other LGBT people and dedicate their love to grand ideals, like extreme nationalism or the Orthodox Church ('Look at Milonov!' -- perhaps the most prominent anti-LGBT politican in Russia - 'He's clearly queer! He goes on holidays with young men...').

A picture of Vladislav collecting signatures for another initiative: this time aimed at the protection of 'green zones' i.e. an environmental project.

The taxi arrives. We rush to pay. My questions  have to end, abrupt. I give Vladislav a hug, wish him luck. He'll need it.

NOTE: A few days later a message arrives, asking once more for my help.  Vladislav desperately needs to find a gay-friendly psychologist to help his boyfriend, who is feeling suicidal and is unable to accept who he is. He fears the worst could happen -- and very soon. It's shocking how even the boyfriend of someone as eloquent as Vladislav could find it difficult to believe that he was worthy; that he deserves to live life with the same dignity as others.  In the same week, I hear the stories of two men whose boyfriends were murdered and many beatings.

The cacophony of abuse is hard to escape. Everywhere we go, there are constant reminders of how hard it can be to live in Russia if you engage in 'non-tradtional sexual relations'. And somehow LGBT+ people move on and try to bear their lives.  Living on: some of them leading relatively happy lives despite difficulties, some of them surviving out of stubborness, some of them hurting... and pretending that it is fine.

3 dates with Rumpelstiltskin

My best friend in Russia is called Rumpelstiltskin.

In this blog, I will explain many of the experiences I have lived through with this unexpected and beautiful person. 

The first date

I first met Rumpelstiltskin two weeks ago. I hadn’t known exactly what to expect. After all, it is not every day that someone introduces themself under the alias of a fairy-tale dwarf, known for his penchant for spinning straw into gold and trying to steal first-borns.  Rumpel and I had, like most of my friends here, met online: my university hasn’t started yet and I have to find some sort of social outlet to practice my Russian and meet weird and wonderful people. She had seen my post in a LGBT+ group and decided to invite me for a walk, saying that I sounded like an interesting person. She had told me her real name before the meeting, but I forgot it almost immediately. As a result, I decided to let my mind run loose with possible Russian-sounding nicknames for Rumpelstiltskin:

Rumpachka, Rumpovka, Rumpanskaja, Alla Rumpolovich, Stiltsky, Rumpichka, Rumpalaika etc.

‘I’m a very lonesome person,’ she wrote, ‘mainly because I have some very odd interests.’

‘What kind of interests?’

‘I like chess, drawing, reading… and investigating the biographies of serial killers.’

Given that my mother also loves serial killers, this seemed like a perfectly natural thing. After all, I had spent much of my childhood reading some sort of children’s book, whilst my mother read magazines about the gruesome murders of the week or watched programmes on the television about people who hacked their lovers to pieces with pencil sharpeners. As a result, Rumpel seemed positively homely.

I was intrigued and replied that I also spent most of my time alone: dreaming, reading, writing… nbut since I arrived in Russia I was mostly sitting on facebook desperately clicking refresh for messages from home or sitting on VK (Russian facebook) looking for the love of my life/friends/social interaction and, of course, eating pickled gherkins from the jar. YUMMY.  I thought we would be a good mix: we’re both quite odd.

Rumpel and I began to talk, but unfortunately I couldn’t understand a word she said. She has a soft voice and there was a lot of noise on the street. Moreover, it always takes me at least a few minutes to get used to a new person speaking Russian. This is one of the most frustrating elements of learning a language.  You can know 95% of the words that a person is saying, but for the first while you might barely understand a single sentence. It takes a certain period of time to get used to the rhythm of a new person’s speech: to figure out where one word begins and where another ends, to distinguish real words from fillers, and to get used to that person’s slang and idiosyncracies.

We walked to an abandoned bench and sat down. I can’t remember much of the discussion, but I recall that at one point she turned to me and said, in a very calm voice: ‘You are very strange…. I like it. You don’t talk straight away. You allow lots of silence’.

 I told her that I hoped it was an ‘easy silence’. A silence that has meaning. It is much better to be still and peaceful together – whether thoughtful or with clear mind – than to fill up time with nervous fillers and small-talk. This is one of the thing that annoys me about England: there are lots of people (and of course I know this is a generalization) who can not handle silence. It makes them sweat. They fill it up with weird babbling about the weather or politicians or Cheryl Cole. To me this is as if someone has recorded an ultrasound scan, turned the volume up and put it on reverse: it can be cute and endearing to watch someone babble nervously for a while, but ultimately it ends up pretty useless. As a result, I tend to just sit in silence, thinking, analysing what someone said, and, to be fair, probably giving either a meaningful or intimidating stare. In any case, my silence is almost always well-intentioned.

 My dearest friends back in England seem to appreciate this: one of them often tells about how she loves to sit side-by-side with her bear-hunting Russian grandfather, just peacefully being, never feeling the need to speak a word to fill up time or space. Just sitting, wrapped in his deep masculine taciturn love, thinking, feeling, reading and being. Peace.

We took a seat on the swings. Moved. Talked. Laughed. And opened to each other. She has a good heart and a hard past: something which seems to be a common theme for a lot of my friends. I fell in platonic love from the first meeting. 

The second date

Rumpel invited me for tea in her little apartment, which she shares with 3 other girls. She had told me at the first meeting that she felt like an ‘outcast’ in her apartment: the girls often sat in the kitchen smoking – a very common Russian pastime, and she felt that it was difficult to integrate or find common topics. She had to share a bed with one of them in a tiny room. (These conditions are normal for Russian students.) Luckily, by the time I had met her, she was feeling much more positive: she had bonded and integrated. The main reason for the unexpected bonding was the washing machine: when put on a cycle, it has a habit of jumping around, with the result that it might pull itself out off the power cable. Consequently, when doing washing loads, the girls are forced to sit on the washing machine to stop it from jumping away.

To me, this seemed like the perfect bonding tool. I imagined two girls walking one after another into the bathroom in stern silence, unwilling to look at each other in the eye. They then elegantly take their respective seats on the washing machine – pulling up their skirts, adjusting their hair and pretending to busy themselves with their phones. Finally, as the washing machine makes its first jitters, one of the girls looks at the other and without losing her icy glare tentatively says: ‘I suppose we should talk, then’. The door closes on the scene.

40 minutes later, the door opens again and we see the girls thoroughly dishevelled, having been bounced around like a bareback bull ride. They are now smiling and bonding over their adversity. GIRLS TRIUMPH OVER WASHING MACHINE, the headlines would read.

 On this second date, an Armenian came to visit. At this stage, I had met more Armenians than Russians in Krasnodar (maybe by coincidence, maybe because they are more willing to meet up with a random Irish man from the internet) and so I decided to tell Rumpel and Armenian no. 5 that I had invented a new turn of phrase for the Russian language:

«Куда ни кинь, есть Армянин» -- “Kuda ni kin’, est’ armjanin”  -- ‘Everywhere you go, you’ll find an Armenian!” (It rhymes in Russian.)

Rumpel and I proceded to drink tea, whilst the Armenian got drunk. He was very friendly, but also intimidatingly beautiful. He had the bad boy image down to a T. He had just the right amount of piercings to be intriguing and edgy, rather than simply metallic. He also had a habit of blowing fantastical smoke patterns into the air from very sexily pinced lips. After a while, realizing that he was drunk and wouldn’t care, I asked him why he smoked so provocatively – turning his head away from me slyly and blowing dragon puffs. He replied that he was smoking that way to keep the smoke out of my eyes.

 ‘A gentleman!’ I thought and melted to the floor. I think my organs are still lying somewhere in a puddle at his Adonic feet. It also didn’t help that he then decided it was time to go to sleep in Rumpel’s bed, but, having spilt water over himself, he needed something to wear. Rumpel offered him her tightest shorts which he appreciatively put on. Watching a drunk Armenian Adonis take pictures of himself in the mirror, hysterically laughing, strutting and flaunting his legs and other parts in female hot pants, shall remain in my memory as one of the oddest, funniest and most strangely erotic things I have ever seen.

 The third date

On our third platonic rendez-vous, Rumpel and I decided to sit on a gate outside her apartment complex, near one of those beautiful neglected Soviet-style play parks, watching the sunset. She told me about a man she had met the night before. A fan of impulsivity, she had decided that she would go visit him, despite the fact that they had only ever talked online before. He was an Armenian male model (YES. ANOTHER ARMENIAN. I’VE LOST COUNT.)

Looking at his online pictures, I didn’t think he was particularly pretty, but Rumpel disagreed fervently and told me he was also an Adonis.  Apparently he liked to talk about clothes -- he was a little bit obsessed, she indicated. Nonetheless, somehow they found common ground and the conversation lasted until late: they smoked shisha, watched films and listened to music. Maybe the late night got to him – or maybe he was overcome by passion --  in any case, by the end of the night he started to act very odd.

‘I’m wearing make-up today…” Rumpel told me, “Did you notice? It’s because he likes to suck.”

“He likes to suck? What does he like to suck?”

“He likes to suck skin.”

At this point, she showed me some pretty holocaustic love bites, and I start to assume that they had had ‘relations’ and he had got a little too frisky. Nothing out of the ordinary, I guess.

‘He nobbled on my ear, too. But it was painful and I didn’t like it.’

Well, not everyone likes an ear nobble. Far enough, I thought.

‘So…’ I said suggestively, ‘how was the rest?’

‘What rest?’

‘The… sex.’

‘Oh. We didn’t have sex. We didn’t even kiss. He just nobbled my ear, sucked my skin for quite a while…and then I went home.’

A strange man, I concluded. But we all have our fetishes.

Our conversation then moved inside. Our voices grew lower and sadder and we started to talk about her dream of living in the forest, far away from civilization. 

‘I want to practice sensory deprivation. I have wanted to try it for a long time now.  You know, you can live for 20 years without food, if you just drink water and don’t move. If you don’t move for 20 years, you don’t need food. I’d like to try that.’

‘Are you sure you’re willing to sacrifice life for that kind of meditation?’

‘I like being alone. And, afterwards, you will either turn insane or come out as one of the purest and wisest human beings that has ever existed. I think I’m willing to take the risk.’

I wondered whether she would ever achieve this dream and whether she would actually be willing to give up her life of spontaneity and extremes in the future. Part of me also wondered – perhaps a little patronizingly – whether this desire for sensory deprivation was a response to trauma in the past or a deep-seated dissatisfaction with what life is today: the pressures of living in the first world, when the basic survival criteria on Maslow’s pyramid of needs have been fulfilled all our lives long, and the only thing left is the trauma of our own social interactions and our own mind.

She told me she had been sent to a psychological institution for chronic stress. They had locked her up there for a month, but it had only made her feel worse. The only advantage was that she made good friends with a schizophrenic, whom she now occasionally visits.

‘I used to cry every night in those weeks before I went to the psychological hospital. It was a relief. It was a painful time, but when I cried, I released the stress, the negativity… if only for a while. When I went to the hospital, they forbade crying. They said it was disruptive. When I cried, they would tie me up tight to a bed, so I couldn’t move. It was uncomfortable. After a month I left the hospital and now no matter how hard I try to cry, I can’t. I have no way to relieve my stress. It’s been 4 and half months, and I still haven’t managed to let the emotions out or to make a tear.’

This, my friends, is the Russian approach to psychological care in the 21^st century.

I asked Rumpel why she thought that they had insisted she shouldn’t cry.

‘Russians live in a cult of taking everything. They suffer because they feel they have to suffer. If something bad happens, they might protest online, but not on the streets. People will judge you if you show too strong emotions in public. In public, you have to have a very official, normal personality, so as not to bother anyone else. It is expected that everyone acts normal – as if they where under perfectly normal circumstances – even when the circumstances are far from normal, even when we are undergoing deep traumas.’

Our deep conversation was interrupted by a phone call. Rumpel started to laugh, and then suddenly announced in an angelic enthusiastic tone:

‘WE’RE GOING TO GO TO A GAY CLUB TONIGHT!”

‘What?’

‘Lera just phoned. She wants to go to the gay club. And we’re going with.’

‘But you said you don’t have your passport?’

‘Oh, yes, well, it’s at home with my parents…. But I think I should try to get in without ID anyway. I’ll just put on lots of makeup to make me look like a whore and then I’ll put on really high heels. It should work!”

                Giggling at her spontaneity, I pulled out a bottle of wine from my bag (yes, I’m always prepared, it seems.).

                ‘Do you have a bottle opener?’

                ‘No. Just use nail scissors.’

                I’m not really sure how you are supposed to pull a cork out with nail scissors, but Rumpel was busy tartifying herself, so I decided to just hack the cork away. Needless to say, it was pretty messy and I ended up with a strange solution of white wine and thin chunks of cork. We drunk it anyway. We needed the courage.

                After an hour or two, we got in a taxi to meet Lera outside the club.

                Lera turned out to be a very strange girl (like everyone I’ve met here), and I don’t quite understand how she thinks/ticks, but she was very friendly to me. Rumpel told me that Lera worked as a prostitute. "Well, she doesn’t like to think of herself as a prostitute, but she goes on dates and has sex with old men for 'gifts'."

                For the first prostitute I’ve ever met, she seemed pretty positive. She had  very enthusiastic dance moves and kept us upbeat. The club was a bit overwhelming for me, however. 

Firstly, there was nowhere to take a break from the pumping music. In the UK, I’ve become quite a fan of going out onto the street to the smokers to breathe some (relatively) fresh air and talk to complete strangers. In this club, people smoked inside, I couldn’t hear a thing and if I had gone outside, I would have found no one. The bouncer also only opened the door on request. I think it was a security issue to protect against homophobes, but in any case, it meant that when he went off on a break or decided to make a call, we were all essentially locked inside a tiny smoke-filled club full of drag queens whose act consisted of encouraging strip teases, wearing ridiculous and funny outfits and lip synching Russian pop songs.

After a while, a sleazy middle-aged man with a straggly fringe came up to me and physically shook me, breathing his hot voice down my ear –

 ‘You’re from Holland, right?’ he said .

‘No, I’m from Ireland.’

‘Ah, do you speak Russian?’

‘Yes, but it’s hard to hear you.’ I said reluctantly. I really couldn’t think of anything I would want to do less at that point in time than talk to that man. I was tired and ready to go home. He started to grab me.

‘LEAVE ME ALONE’ I said and turned to Rumpel.

At this point Rumpel activated her endearing bitch mode and told him to go fuck himself. He didn’t oblige. In his disgusting sexism, he took her anger as a sign of ‘female feistiness’ – this wasn’t a rejection to him, but just some sort of flirtatious resistance. Nonetheless, I could tell Rumpel would destroy him with her sly tongue, and destroy him she did. I’m pretty sure his testicles slid right back up into his body. If he had any to begin with.

He then turned to Lera and we were forced to wait as she seemed to enjoy his company. They talked for over an hour, laughing and charming each other, whilst Rumpel and I sat at a table, half-hoping we would fall unconscious from the smoke fumes and die peacefully in our sleep.

 Eventually Lera came back and said it was time to go. We waited about 10 minutes for the bouncer to open the door – he had to be completely sure that we had a way to get home. It turned out that the sleazy man had kindly decided to pay a taxi to take all three of us to our places of residence. However, it wasn’t a normal taxi: but rather just an individual who had decided to drive around clubs in the middle of the night in the hope that people would pay him to take them home. His friend sat in the front passenger’s seat, out of his face on beer.

I reluctantly got into the taxi. I didn’t even know it was a taxi, but I trusted that Rumpel probably wouldn’t let me die. The drunk passenger friend of the taxi driver insisted on playing music at deafening volume, and even though we protested, he continued. I think he thought we were just wimps who couldn’t handle DA PARTAYYYYYYYY.

In any case, Lera told them to drive her to her ‘female friend’s house’.  On the journey, the drunk passenger continually made us down beer (although Rumpel managed to refuse). On arriving at the street, Lera phoned her friend: ‘Hey Pasha, where is your house?’. This solicited a strange reaction from the taxi driver and his friend, given that Pasha is a male name. ‘What are you trying to trick us with?’ they asked. ‘Ammm…’ Lera sweetly said and invented some sort of implausible excuse that left them charmed and satisfied with having met such a 'cute girl'. 

Once Lera had left, the drunk passenger turned around, looked me in the eye and asked:

‘Are you a homosexual?’

I had no idea what to say. I was pretty scared that he might beat me up and turn out to be a crazy homophobe. But before I had time to think of a reply, Rumpel was already explaining:

‘Yes, of course, he is. We just came from a gay club. It’s quite fun, really’.

He then stared at me once more, wide eyed, and just when I thought he was going to tell that he thought I should be gassed and deported, he spoke the following words in the most serious of voices:

‘I respect you.’

I was pretty damn relieved and very happy to have found an overweight, drunk masculine Russian man who wasn’t homophobic. LUCK OF LUCKS!

He then, however, started to ask me the typical weird Russian questions.

‘Where do you come from?’

‘Ireland.’

‘Ahhh, Holland. What’s life like there?’

‘NO. IRELAND.’

‘OH, where’s that?’

‘It’s an island. It’s near England.’

And this point, Rumpel added, trying to help: ‘He’s from Northern Ireland.’

‘Ahh, I get it. There’s Ireland and Northern Ireland. And England and Northern England.’

‘Well, no, not quite…’

‘Tell me, are you a Jew?’

‘Ummm…No.’

‘But you don’t look Irish.’

‘But I am Irish.’

‘Are you sure you’re not a Jew?’

‘Yes.’

‘C’mon, if you’re a Jew, you can tell me.’

‘I would tell you, but I am actually not a Jew. I’ve never even met an Irish Jew.’

‘You’re probably Jewish.’

‘Well, if I’m Jewish I don’t know it yet.’

He then told me the name of some obscure Irish band and took the fact that I didn’t know they existed as further evidence that I was a Jew.

Nonetheless, he was happy to meet me and wished me successful as I stepped out of the taxi, slightly confused about everything that had happened in the last 24 hours, but relieved to feel the fresh air, the cold night and the promise of a bed.

Crossing Borders

I recently made a post about my goals in Russia in both my private blog (for you lovelies who actually care about my personal development) and my new sparkling, only mildly shite LGBT+  in Russia blog. After about 2 weeks in Krasnodar, it is probably time that I updated you all on what has been going on in this Slavic paradise. I realize that it is easier to read in small chunks, so I will dedicate this post to the first 2 days. I will then write another post in the very immediate future about my strange flatmates who waged a Cold War against my shampoo, the large abundance of Armenians in my life and my new Georgian bezzie m8 4 lyfe who goes by the alias of Rumpelstiltskin. A little while after that, I will write a post about my brief interview with an LGBT rights activist from Sochi. In the meantime, I give you a 14 hour bus journey, a gold-toothed grandmother and a fisherman who likes to talk about fish (surprisingly enough).

ARRIVAL

The Beautiful Bus of Doom

I arrived in Russia at 5 am in the morning after a 14 hour bus ride from Sevastopol’, Ukraine. It seemed like a very logical decision at the time. After all, I had wanted to see Ukraine and there were no direct flights between Belgium and Krasnodar. It turned out, however, to be a thoroughly unpleasant experience. Having bought the very last ticket to Krasnodar, I was seated at the front of the bus beside a sleeping academic and a series of macho bus drivers, who swore in their best ‘russkii mat’ (Russian swear words), ate seeds all through the journey (Russians love to eat seeds!), smoked quite a bit and drove fairly recklessly. From previous experience, I wasn’t expecting any great road safety and I was willing to pass it off as one of those quaint Eastern European things. After all, I had already got used to taxi drivers saying ‘NE NADO’ (‘you don’t have to!’) every time I had tried to put my seatbelt on. Moreover, despite the fact that they drove in highly creative manners, I hadn’t died yet. The passing cars formed the main difficulty for my comfort: the bright headlights impeded sleep and instead hyptonized me into a surreal tired trance: my head slowly bobbed down and up and down again as I attempted sleep and my head gradually emptied itself of everything but a vague drone of thoughts: a radio in my mind, low volume, passing through all the un-tuned stations of the Ukrainian steppe.

My hypnosis was interrupted by a 2 hour wait at the border. We queued at the Ukrainian side for the border control, queued again for a suitcase inspection, got on a 15 minute ferry, queued for another suitcase inspection, queued at the Russian side again, and then finally drove on. My hearing isn’t the best, so when the Ukrainian border guard asked me to take off my glasses, my sleepy-delirious reply was a very abrupt Russian ‘SHTO?’ (= ‘what?’), from which she concluded that I must not understand her language. She therefore proceeded to call over her colleague, who repeated the instructions in Russian, which I promptly obeyed. Having then realized that I spoke their language, border guard no. 2 happily exclaimed ‘HE SPEAKS RUSSIAN’. They then, for no apparent reason, began to giggle and gossip in whispers for about 3 minutes whilst looking at my passport. They smiled, wished me 'udachi' ('good luck') and sent me on my way.

The bus arrived 2 hours earlier than I had expected (at 5am, not 7), so I decided not to go immediately to my hostel. I didn’t want to disturb their sleep and I thought it better to wait for a few hours until a civilized time. The train station had the huge luxury of wifi, something which on my travels I value like an ambitious infertile father values a gold-studded vial of sperm from an Ivy League Sports-competent sperm donor (Forgive me, I’m trying really hard to come up with original analogies). It turned out that this wifi  cut off every 15 minutes with the message ‘After 15 minutes of wifi, there will be a recuperation pause of 5 minutes’. That was a tad annoying, but better than nothing. In the end, I found myself deliriously laughing out loud in the station at the idea that my wifi was recuperating: I envisaged some sort of meme where the wifi is like ‘feck this, I’m going to sleep. OVER AND OUT’. I'm not sure whether it was actually funny or whether I was just hysterical...

THE FISHERMAN

After a while of sitting on the internet, I was approached by an old man, who, taking a strange interest in my bottle of sparkling water, proceeded to ask me lots of questions, as listed below:

1 ' Is that bottled water?'

'Da.'

'Is that sparkling bottled water?'

'Da.'

'You managed to get a whole litre?'

'Nuuuuu DA.'

‘Did you get it in the station?'

‘Da-da-da. Over there.’

‘Oh, that’s wonderful. Maybe I will buy some... How much did it cost?’

‘I can’t remember, I’m not very good at rubles.’

‘Oh, are you a foreigner?’

‘Yes, I’m from Ireland..’

‘Ah, Holland. I’ve heard it’s a beautiful country’.

‘No, Ireland.’

‘Ahh, okay. What language do they speak in your country? Dutch?’

‘No, we speak English. Although some people still speak Irish.’

‘I heard you have great ice skating in Holland.’

‘I wouldn’t know. We don’t actually have much ice in Ireland’.

‘Ahh, you’re from IRELAND. Ahh, now I know, Ireland and Scotland and Holland, you’re all together.’

‘No, no, Ireland is a separate island, and Scotland is on the same island as England. Holland – or the Netherlands – is on the European mainland.’

…

‘Tell me, what kind of fish do you eat in Ireland?’

                ‘Sorry, I wouldn’t know, I don’t eat fish.’

                ‘Do you have pike?’

                ‘Probably.’

                ‘Do you have cod?’

                ‘Probably.’

                ‘Do you have salmon?’

                ‘I think we do.’

                (And so on with a long list of fish, some of which I didn’t understand, but nonetheless assumed that they probably could be found in Ireland. He seemed to take more pleasure in finding out that we had a certain type of fish than in me answering that I didn’t know, so after a while I just started answering that, yes, indeed, we did have that fish. We have lots of fish. Salt water AND fresh water fish! Big fish and small fish! Little fish and large fish! Long fish and short fish! ALL THE FISH! AN UNIMAGINABLE ABUNDANCE OF FISH!)

He then asked me a few other stereotypical questions (which I encounter almost every day) to which I replied with a few stereotypical stock answers:

1     ‘Are Russian women pretty?’

‘Oh, yes. They’re very pretty. Irish women and English women are ugly in comparison.’ (I knew he would love this answer, so I decided to humour him. To be honest, Russian women are often prettier, but not always. In any case, I have lots of better things to do than carry out an intensive quantitative scientific study on the subjective beauty of Russian girls, so I just give the general answer.)

2      ‘Do you have good beer there?’

‘Yup. Excellent beer. We love pubs.’

3     ‘Do you do Irish dances?’

‘Ah-hum. Every day I wake up and immediately do a brisk jig whilst simultaneously harvesting the potato crop with my withered countryman hands.’ (Okay, I didn’t actually say this, but I thought it.)

He told me he had just come back from visiting relatives in Ukraine and was waiting for the first tram to go home. This seemed pretty reasonable (taxis are extremely expensive in comparison with the £0.30 tram rides) and we struck up quite an interesting conversation about his life as a fisherman (now all the extensive fish questions made more sense), his wife and his life in the Soviet Union. I was too deliriously tired to remember any of it, but it seemed fairly interesting at the time. I do however recall that he said that he had never been abroad, even though he had just returned from Ukraine. ‘Isn’t Ukraine a different country these days?’ I asked timidly, knowing the answer. ‘Bah, Ukraine isn’t abroad. It’s all politics’. And on that note, he left.

THE HOSTEL

When they said 'hostel', my first thought wasn't a multi-storey apartment complex, but there you go...

At about 8 am, I bade farewell to the station and got into a taxi to the address of my ‘hostel’. The hostel, however, turned out to be far from what I had expected. First of all, it wasn’t in an obvious location but in a huge apartment complex without a sign. It turned out that rather than booking into a hostel, I had actually booked into a strange Russian phenomenon known as a ‘private hotel’ i.e. a flat with a few spare rooms, where a lonely gold-toothed grandmother rents out beds to migrant workers or part-time students. The first obstacle when arriving at the address and being promptly abandoned by the taxi driver (‘You’ll find it, don’t worry!'), was managing to phone the owner. My telephone didn’t want to work in Russia, so I had to ask a passer-by to call. Luckily, he swiftly obliged (‘There’s a foreigner on the street. He wants to go to your hotel. Come get him!”).  The owner quickly came out, bleary eyed and slightly dishevelled, and welcomed me to my empty 6 bed dorm. I dropped my 30kg suitcase on the floor and slept for a whole day, only waking up for an hour at 8pm to go to the supermarket and buy a Russian simcard (for which, by the way, you need to enter your address, passport details and other information. A strange concept for a Westerner, but apparently they need my personal details for protection against crime.).

The next day I met up with my only friend in Krasnodar ( a friendly Adygean (yes, I didn’t know that was a nationality either) called Tim, who promised to find me an apartment and turned out to be a huge help in my first emotionally-troubled Russian days, for which I am very grateful); registered my passport with a friendly Ivan Ivanovich; talked to my wheezy voiced head of department (he was also friendly, but his voice sounded like the imitation of that Soviet bad guy in an American film who smokes 120 cigarettes a day and has a hook for a hand); and, when the sun had started to set, I fell in love with a little park where I wondered at how the sky could be so beautiful, full of orange and red and pink, and how I could have transformed into this strange traveller who has reached this place – this Russia, this East, this sunset – and decided to stay. I am still wondering and still discovering.  

As always, 

with love,

D.